1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical fiber photoconductor that can be effectively utilized as an image-transmitting member, a light guide or an optical sensor. More particularly, the present invention relates to an optical fiber photoconductor comprising at least two aligned multi-filament type plastic optical fibers, each optical fiber having a substantially rectangular sectional shape wherein 50 to 10000 core-sheath light-transmitting islands having a diameter of 5 to 200.mu. are densely arranged.
2. Description of the Related Art
An optical fiber photoconductor formed by laminating a plurality of units, each unit consisting of a multi-filament type plastic optical fiber as mentioned above, and bonding at least one ends of the units to one another with an adhesive, can be formed into an image-transmitting member having a large number of image-transmitting elements, and therefore, it is expected that the fields of application of this photoconductor will rapidly expand.
Nevertheless, in this conventional light-transmitting member, as shown in FIG. 2, spaces 22 among multi-filament type plastic optical fiber units 21 have a much larger area than the area of light-transmitting islands 23 constituting the optical fiber units, and since the spaces have neither an image-transmitting property nor a light-transmitting property, these spaces form dark field areas, which become non-image areas when the image-transmitting member is actually used. Therefore, the reflected picture is very difficult to see and an observer is quickly irritated thereby. When this photoconductor is used as the light guide, since bonding interfaces 22 between the multi-filament type optical fiber units become non-image-transmitting portions, the transmission efficiency is reduced and a uniform transmission of image becomes impossible.